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In the years 2000 to 2006, 20 people drowned in the Russian River in Sonoma County and 14 of them were young Hispanic men, the County Coroner's records show. "The Hispanic community comprises 20 percent of the resident population in Sonoma, but accounts for 75 percent of drowning deaths that occur in our rivers, lakes, and pools," according to the Red Cross of Sonoma County.

Maria Moto-Fincher, station manager of Univision's KDTV 28 in Santa Rosa, has been aware of these drownings for years. "Since 1965 I've lived near the river," she said. "Every summer, when I heard the helicopter really low, people went missing." She and others believe that many of the casualties are seasonal agricultural workers from Latin America, especially Mexico.

"They come from the heart of Mexico,"she explained. "They don't haveaccess to rivers and lakes. They're poor.They just come here to work for the season. They work, they go to theriver with friends for a picnic, they drink, because that is what they do. Then they swim. The river is too strong for them and--" She shrugged in frustration.

In the heat of summer, many agricultural workers, as well as local families in the region, seek out the cool and deceptively inviting river, unaware of the strength of the currents and the rapid changes that can occur. As a result, all too often, bodies of young men are shipped back to places like Jalisco and Michoacán.

Moto-Fincher is passionately committed to spreading the word about river hazards through her Spanish-language television program in hopes of helping to save lives. "We did a one-minute public service announcement for the Red Cross last year," she said. "That was the first thing they had in Spanish." The announcement, promoting swimming lessons and water safety, was aired repeatedly in the early mornings to catch waves of people heading out to work. On the day we spoke in her studio, Moto-Fincher and station producer Hugo López were putting the finishing touches on a 20-minute video about Vamos a Nadar (Let's Swim), a Spanish-language swimming program for children, which also includes water-safety training for parents. It is offered by the Red Cross and the Sonoma County Regional Parks and Recreation Department.

Moto-Fincher's KDTV program, Retrato Hispano, airs Mondays from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., when fieldworkers are most likely to tune in. By 4 a.m. their workday is already under way. She has watched groups of them "wearing lights, headlamps, you know, on their hats--to pick the grapes. . . ." If they see just a few minutes of the program before leaving for work, "just one thing like grabbing a branch, that is something in the moment they can remember and maybe survive."

The video on Vamos a Nadar is a creative outgrowth of the Sonoma County Water Safety Committee's concern about the drownings. This committee was formed in the early 1990s, bringing together representatives of the Red Cross, State Parks, local public swimming pools, city governments, County Regional Parks, and the Coastal Conservancy. One of the first products was the Russian River Access Guide, published in Spanish and English, which highlighted ten beach access points and detailed river dangers. Bilingual warning signs were also installed at key places on the river, and press releases were distributed at the beginning of the swimming season to warn about the risks.

Rosiris Guerra and Bert Whitaker, members of the Water Safety Committee, designed the Vamos a Nadar and Vamos a Ser Salvavidas (Let's Be Lifeguards) outreach and training programs in hopes of effecting a cultural shift in the Spanish-speaking community. The goal is to raise awareness of river hazards and build desire to learn how to swim and use water safety skills. Since 2004, the programs have been coordinated: Children take swimming lessons while parents receive rescue skills training, and teens train to become lifeguards.

"We need long-term solutions," said Guerra, who now chairs the committee. "If the parents don't think it is important, they won't do it. If the kids don't learn, they won't know."

Social Marketing
As I learned more about the Red Cross programs, I came to see how they fit with the concept of social marketing developed by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman in the 1970s. Social marketing uses traditional marketing skills to promote behavioral change, and has been adopted internationally by nongovernmental organizations and public agencies seeking to combat disease, promote better nutrition, prevent smoking, and encourage such practices as recycling and local watershed stewardship. The purpose of marketing is to create desire for a product, without regard to the perceived cost of its acquisition. In the Sonoma effort, the "product" is a belief within the Hispanic community that it is important to know how to swim and be able to save lives.

Experience here and abroad has shown that signs and leaflets are not enough. Accidents occur even where water dangers are well marked. Knowing a risk exists is not necessarily enough to motivate a person to behave differently. The risks of many popular vices, such as speeding, overeating, or smoking, are well known, for example, but that does not keep people from continuing to indulge. One thing that can make an impression deep enough to change behavior is experience--either a frightening experience of one's own or the personal story of someone else's.

In the KDTV studio, Fincher cued up their current work-in-progress. On the video screen, a graduate of Vamos a Nadar translated into Spanish as Michelle Wilder told a group of Hispanic parents how her teenaged son drowned in the river in May 2005. (See www.apebbleinthepond.org for more on Wilder.) The parents were visibly moved. Their children were at a swimming lesson as they listened.

The video cut to a young Latina in a red sweatshirt, Jenira Chang, a graduate of Vamos a Ser Salvavidas, who now works as a lifeguard and leads classes for the Red Cross. She too had a story: her uncle drowned in the river.

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